On the Thursday the 9th of April, Youssef Chabouni (Yusef) was brutally murdered while trying to stop a gang fight involving Moroccan-Dutch youths in the city of s’Hertogenbosch. 
Dear Alyah,
Your aunties Sabah and Naima with whom I have been best friends for years asked me to write a eulogy to commemorate the passing of your father Yusef. I started doing so, but with every line I wrote, I recognized that I should actually be addressing you. Yes, you, a five month old enfant. It is in you that his hopes and dreams live on. If your father did not have faith in love and life he would
not have conceived you. No matter how bleak a moment you will face when you grow up, and those moments will surely come, you must always remember that you are a symbol of his faith.
I address this letter to you not as an academic to a child, as the learned man to the novice. Such is the foolishness of those who take their social status far too seriously. I am writing you because I realize that one of the most important aspects of human life is the passing on of advice. What I offer is advice. Sift through it and you use what you like. I cannot offer you a credible explanation as to why your father was murdered. All I can say to you is that God, the beautiful name men and women of all cultures have given to Universal Justice, does not sleep. And God was not asleep the day your father died. So why did God then let such a terrible crime happen, you may ask yourself when you are old enough to fathom what happened. I advise you to never contemplate such thoughts. Such a question is not worth asking. It leads to madness and what’s more, it is actually not the right question to ask.
You should be addressing your question to mankind, for it is we who constantly show disregard for each others lives. Your father’s death and I do not mean to trivialize it by saying this, is an echo of one of the consistent sounds our species has been making. When you realize this, despair disappears and hope appears. For anything that we have created, we can re-create differently. God can lend a helping hand in these endeavors, for goodness comes to those who struggle and fight for their goodness and the goodness of others. I/We, meaning I am because We are, and We are what We are because of how each
and every individual acts and thinks, is simplest and truest philosophical formula. You do well to remember this formula.
Allthis means that when you grow up you will have to decide what role you will play as a co-creator of the kingdom of mankind. In the Netherlands, this little hamlet of that global kingdom, persons of Moroccan descent have a bad name. From my fellow academics who earn their bread and butter researching the socalled marokkaanse problem, the Moroccan issue, you can get all the statistics about the felonies committed by Moroccan problem youth and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism among this sector of the Dutch population. From the mouthpieces of popularized barbarism, and by that I mean populist politicians
and columnists, you can get a sense of the current sentiment that lives in the hearts of too many Dutch citizens. From defenders of the Moroccan “community”—academics, liberal politicians, and columnists—you can get counterarguments to demolish the equating of the term Moroccan with crime and religious fanaticism. I refuse to offer you that.
I refuse to use your father’s death as a social cause, whether it be a liberal cause or a conservative one. Your father did not die for a cause. He died because many of us reduce ourselves solely to passion driven beings because we are socially reduced to unthinking beings. Your father’s killer was such a being. You have every right to be angry with him. You do not have any right to hate him. Anger and hatred must not be confused. My way of not confusing them is to always remember that the person I am angry with is also somebody’s child. Hating him or her is dehumanizing that person and therefore indirectly
doing violence to the mother and father of the perpetrator of the offence. Moreover it makes the hater a passion driven being, a being that does not combine passion with thought.
You must never let that happen to you and we who love you must do our utmost best that this does not happen to you. And if we do our best and you do yours, when you are a grown woman, the Moroccan issue will be but a distant memory. You will be able to climb into trams, walk in the parks, and go to job interviews, without the sneers and the fears. You will also be aware of the new
scapegoat (a recently arrived group). If you remember that I/We philosophy, you will not participate in that latest hysteria. You will combine passion with rigorous thought, which when done well breeds morality.
I promised your aunties Sabah and Naima to write a eulogy. I wrote a letter to you. I hope that one day you too will write a letter to someone who needs to hear words of hope in the storm that we call life.
Yours Truly
Francio
DrFrancio Guadeloupe
Department of Cultural Anthropology & Development Studies
Radboud University Nijmegen
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